THIS TIME IT’S PERSONAL
An amusing story did the rounds in the papers in April 2015; it involved Ed Miliband, the then Labour leader, and Stephanie Flanders, the former BBC economics editor. It was revealed that shock!, horror!, the pair had been an item at some point in 2004. Coy journalists called it a relationship, though the fact that Flanders phrased it as her and Miliband having ‘dated’ (her quotation marks) fleetingly probably means that the fling was more carnal than emotional.
This was hardly Watergate, and it did disappear after a few days, but it was quite a telling tale. When they were seeing each other, Miliband was working at the Treasury and Flanders was Newsnight’s economics correspondent; though it surely must have been a decent piece of gossip to get at the time, a political adviser and a journalist having a fling would not have raised many an eyebrow. Still, both their careers skyrocketed, and suddenly it became something worth telling the public about. This is revealing in two ways, but we’ll keep the second one for later.
First, let’s look at the obvious. We’ve already discussed the closeness of people and blurring of professional and personal boundaries in Westminster at length, but there is something missing: the fact that a lot of people who come into politics will be there for years, if not decades. While some MPs and peers do only join their respective benches in their forties or later, and after having lived a real life in the real world, most denizens of SW1 got into the bubble in their twenties, early thirties at most, and intend to stay there for as long as they can. They are also fundamentally odd people who are more likely than most to be reasonably alienated from the rest of the country. The results are, well, predictable.
‘Everyone was at it, because people in politics are mad, and they spend all their time in politics, and they socialise with people in politics. And so if they’re going to have sex with anyone it’s going to be people in politics,’ says one former Labour adviser. ‘It’s a bit like when people said Brangelina enhanced both of their statuses – in political relationships, your networks become their networks if you’re a political couple. I’ve got a lot of friends who are in political relationships, and I definitely think it adds value to that end.’
Someone who once found themselves in that situation confirmed this view, adding: ‘At the point at which I was going out with another special adviser, I knew way more stuff! I knew all the stuff I knew, and all the stuff the other special adviser knew, at least when we had time to talk about it. And so suddenly you become incredibly powerful with the knowledge of what’s going on, because you’ve got the knowledge of two special advisers.’
If you do end up dating someone you have no conflict of interest with and you fall in love and it lasts and you get married and you have children then it’s all great; a cottage and 2.4 children has never titillated anyone, so your peers won’t be talking behind your back and there won’t be any repercussions in either of your jobs.
If you end up breaking up with them, or worse, having an affair, or breaking up with someone and dating someone else in the bubble straight afterwards, there will be trouble ahead. For a start, a lot of people you know will be dying to get every detail of your fling, and pass them along to other people.*
‘That happened during the last election quite a lot,’ says one political wag. ‘People were saying, “Oh, blah blah’s sleeping with blah blah.” But if they’re all sleeping with all these people they a) wouldn’t get any work done and b) they’d probably have an STI by now. So how about we just rein it in a little bit and just gossip about things that we know are true? Because I have no qualms about doing that.’ (How charitable.)
In fairness to this staffer and the people like her, it can be genuinely useful to know who is sleeping with whom in order to do your job properly, or at least not step your foot in it. Esther McVey and Philip Davies’ relationship is a good example of that, and Yvette Cooper and Ed Balls is another famous one.
‘I remember when I was Treasury press secretary [in the mid-90s], Yvette Cooper who was economics correspondent with the Independent came to see me and Gus O’Donnell for a briefing on the government preparations for the euro,’ says Jill Rutter. And she said, “What do you think Labour thinks of it?” We looked at her and said, “Well, we actually think you’re better placed to answer that.”’
Ed Balls was, of course, working in the Shadow Treasury team at the time. While this should have been a pretty clear-cut case of blatant conflict of interest, they remained together and eventually both became Labour MPs, which made matters easier.
It is also impossible to overstate just how common these relationships can be. In 2017, Politico tried to compile a list of Westminster’s power couples. Among others, they listed: MP Bernard Jenkin and peer Baroness Jenkin, leader of the House of Lords Baroness Evans and special adviser James Wild, the Guardians Patrick Wintour and The Times’ Rachel Sylvester, special advisers Lizzie Loudon and Will Tanner, the Telegraph’s Peter Dominiczak and special adviser Lottie Dexter, the Sunday Times’ Tim Shipman and No 10’s Charlotte Todman, The Spectator’s Isabel Hardman and MP John Woodcock, MP Ben Bradshaw and the BBC’s Neal Dalgleish, MP Jo Johnson and the Guardian’s Amelia Gentleman and many (many, many) more.
The list was far from exhaustive, as it only mentioned ongoing and public long-term relationships between relatively well-known people; naming everyone who has dated in Westminster in the past ten years would probably take a whole other book altogether.
Oh, and it didn’t take affairs and drunken one-night stands into account – which is fair enough – but it does not mean that they do not happen with a degree of frequency. There is the famous story of the special adviser and the journalist shagging against a window in a hotel room at a party conference, oblivious to the fact that a gaggle of press photographers were waiting for politicians to come out of the hotel, and instead killed time by looking up and enjoying the show. To their credit, the story has done the rounds many times but never with names attached to it, though it might be that they did not know who the pair actually were.
There is also the story of the junior minister who started sleeping with a senior No 10 adviser then found themselves appearing on television more than ever before; the prominent Leave campaigner and Remain campaigner who would argue on television then make up at home; the senior party staffer who secretly broke the heart of a political journalist; the two special advisers who stopped talking after breaking up, which meant that communication broke down between their two departments; the several love triangles in No 10; and so on.*
These stories were worth mentioning because they have some colour to them, but for each of them there must be about a dozen dull ones no one really finds out about or cares about; the MPs who sleep with their aides, the spads who sleep with their bosses, the journalists who sleep together, and more.
The obvious question here is: Why do they do it? There are different ways to look at it. The first one is that the people of Westminster are just people, and it’s not infrequent for colleagues to have a snog at the Christmas party or a fling that lasts for a few months then trails off. In quite a revealing move regarding the social class of political people, several of this book’s interviewees compared the promiscuousness of SW1 to the worlds of medicine and law. According to them, there is just as much if not more shagging and drama happening in hospitals and chambers, it’s just that no one outside those industries cares about it. That is a reasonable point, though one might argue that the potential for conflicts of interest when, say, a barrister and a clerk go at it are less of a pressing issue.
The other hypothesis comes from Isabel Hardman’s Why We Get The Wrong Politicians. In it, she explains: ‘In his book The Winner Effect, neuroscientist Ian Robertson describes how the brains of people in power change as they experience more of it. Power – and sex – causes a surge in testosterone, he writes, adding that “high testosterone levels further increase the appetite for power and sex, in a politico-erotic vicious circle”.’
This chimes in with the assessment of former MP Jerry Hayes, which does somewhat feel like wishful thinking: ‘For some reason, some young men and young women find the power of an MP attractive. God knows why. I remember I was having a drink with a very attractive girl years ago, and she said to me, “I really want to fuck John Major.” I said, “Really? Why?” And she said, “Well, he’s the Prime Minister! Doesn’t everyone want to fuck the Prime Minister?” I said, “I don’t really know.”’*
Before moving on, it should be pointed out that despite what this chapter might have made it sound like, Westminster is not a place where people don’t do much besides fucking like rabbits. The majority of people do manage to keep it in their pants, and some are even said to be in stable, long-term, loving relationships. This does not mean that they do not have to wrestle with the complex nature of blurry lines between acceptable friendships and problematic closeness. But let’s quickly go back to where we left off at the end of the first part.
BEST OF FRENEMIES
So you’re a journalist and you’re roughly three months into your life as a political hack. You’ve got a few sources at your disposal and you’re starting to understand the place. Fast forward about a year; you’ve now got a decent amount of sources, with whom you keep in touch by going for either lunch, coffee or drinks every other week. Some of them are just that; sources you occasionally see, talk about work, maybe sprinkle in the occasional bit of gossip, but nothing more than that. Others have already started slipping into friendship territory; you started out with a light ‘Oh, did you hear that…?’, it was followed by a ‘By the way, has anyone told you…?’ and long story short, it is now someone you see socially as well as professionally.
Beyond the obvious use of functional information networks in politics, there is a reason why friendships happen when people start gossiping with each other – even academics say so. In the sexily named study ‘The co-evolution of gossip and friendship in workplace social networks’, Lea Ellwardt, Christian Steglich and Rafael Wittek conclude: ‘Gossip favors the creation of friendship relations, rather than vice versa; gossip is often shared between employees who are not friends (yet). […] A key finding of our study is that talking about absent colleagues can strengthen informal relationships between employees.’
Now, let’s fast forward some more; it is a good few years into your career, you’re a senior political correspondent at a national newspaper, and that special adviser/parliamentary assistant/newly elected MP has become an influential figure in government or opposition. How do you deal with it?
‘Michael White’s rule was never in your house and never in theirs,’ says one long-term hack. ‘But you do make friends with people – there was one MP at my fortieth birthday dinner. But he was somebody I knew before he was an MP, and he’s actually now sort of rising somewhat. My bosses know that he is my mate, and I’ve said, “Look, I’m the wrong person to write an interview or profile of this guy because he’s my mate, and I feel that that would be dishonest.”’
Tim Shipman puts it slightly differently: ‘For a long time, my social life was totally separate from my Westminster life, but if you’re doing the job properly that becomes untenable because you spend so much time here. I ended up marrying someone who at the time was working in No 10, and inevitably you develop social friendships that are helpful to your understanding of what’s going on and sometimes that means you hear things but most journalists in those situations would be pretty careful about using information that they found in a social situation. […] I don’t think friendships with politicians can ever be the same as friendships with non-politicians because they’re grown-ups and they know that one day you might write something unpleasant about them, and I’ve written a number of unpleasant things about people I get on with very well.’
This feels like a reasonable place at which to draw the line, but the example given is one of the more clear-cut ones. Though journalists certainly like to think that they can remain impartial when it comes to a good scoop, it isn’t always that easy. The Tessa Jowell story was a good example of this; another, broader one can be about implicit bias. If you hear or see something that is definitely in the public interest, it is not hard to decide to publish it. If, however, the story is a bit more gossipy, perhaps a bit more trivial, can you be certain that your friendship or lack thereof with an MP would have no influence on what you do with that piece of intelligence?
We will come back to the general question of newsworthiness in a bit, but it seems absolutely fair to point out now that there are many known things in Westminster which never make it out of the place. While some of them remain open secrets because they are impossible to properly stand up, others are simply shared around the bubble, as people would do in an office or a group of friends, which would be fine if the people mentioned weren’t running Britain.
As James Cleverly puts it: ‘I think where it’s sometimes had a reputation as a bit of an unhealthy relationship is where journalists who have been, either drinking with, or drinking near politicians who have said or done something stupid, and a journalist has said, “Actually you know what? I’m not going to report that because I know they didn’t really quite mean it like that, or I suspect they didn’t quite mean it like that.” And then at some point in the future when those comments hit the public domain, there’s been question marks over … well, hang on? If everybody knew that was happening, why did nobody report it? And I think that does undermine our collective credibility both as politicians and journalists.’
Cleverly certainly has a point, but it is still worth thinking about whether all gossip by definition is in the public interest, and if not, where the line is drawn. After all, there have already been complaints for decades (rightly or wrongly) about how the political press tends to focus on tittle-tattle as opposed to hard news. If journalists were to suddenly publish every titbit they hear on the grapevine, the sheer amount of information coming out of Westminster would be overwhelming to the point of becoming useless. Still, this has often gone too far the other way, as the multiple sexual harassment and bullying scandals of 2017 and 2018 have shown.
BAD BEHAVIOUR / THE WHISPER NETWORK
When a story comes out about a politician being creepy, gropey or worse, the typical reaction from people in Westminster tends to be, ‘Finally! I swear everyone’s known about this for ages,’ or, at a push, ‘So apparently everyone knew about this but me?’ This is not a hypothetical statement: when, for example, Defence Secretary Michael Fallon left the Cabinet because of the way he had behaved towards some female journalists, bubble dwellers tripped over themselves to emphasise just how unsurprised they were by the allegations. In fact, the consensus quickly became that he resigned because he knew that there was a lot more about to come out about his behaviour, and so did everyone else.
We will probably never know if this really was the case or not, but it is true that a number of rumours about him had been swirling around the Palace for years, most repeated so wildly that no one can really tell where they originally came from. He is not an exception: if someone has groped or cheated their way through Parliament, a lot of people will know about it. Well, at least a lot of young men and women will, depending on the sexual preferences of the creep in question.
‘I remember an MP in the private members’ ballot who agreed to take on our bill,’ recalls one aide, ‘and being warned by every woman that heard, “You want to watch out for that …” and so it proved.’
There are the MPs who are known as ‘handsy’ (or for their ‘wandering hands’), ones who are ‘not safe in taxis’, ones to avoid one-on-one when drunk, and ones to avoid altogether. There is the MP who caresses the thigh of whoever is young, male and nearby, the one who gets young women so drunk they wake up with no idea whether he did something to them or not, the one who brings young men to his hotel room at a conference, the one who pounces on young women on trips abroad, and so many more.
These MPs will not remain anonymous because of social
reasons, but because doing so could ruin the careers of the people they preyed on. It is deeply unfair and infuriating that having been sexually assaulted and outing the culprit can make you less employable than you used to be, but it’s still how it works. There is also no certainty that anything would happen to these men, as women have been known to courageously come out with allegations, only for the accused to keep their career anyway.
Not long ago, campaigner Jasvinder Sanghera accused Lord Lester of having groped her and told her that if she slept with him, he would make her a baroness. The privileges and conduct committee decided to suspend him from the House of Lords for four years, but the move was blocked by a vote in the House of Lords. Asked about the case, Sanghera said that she would not recommend going to parliamentary authorities to anyone in a similar situation to hers, as it clearly is not worth it.
Even if you are believed and the person faces some consequences for their actions, chances are that you will still be defined by the event. Nearly a year after she wrote about then cabinet minister Damian Green’s inappropriate behaviour towards her, journalist and commentator Kate Maltby was described in a prominent political morning briefing as ‘the writer who accused Damian Green [etc.]’. Oh, and she got her very own tabloid character assassination at the time, obviously.
‘The problem is that MPs, even the ones with wandering hands, have loads and loads of friends, and unless that person was actually physically assaulting people in a violent way, the attitude that you would have been greeted with, had you reported somebody like that would have been, you know, “He’s harmless, and you are destroying an essentially harmless good man by doing that,” and your career would suffer,’ says one adviser who worked in politics until the mid-2000s.
‘You would make enemies by doing that. And if they were an MP that was supportive to the leadership, or a loyal voting fodder MP, you would do yourself an awful lot of damage. People would consider it unhelpful. And when you’re trying to forge your path in a world that isn’t particularly welcoming to young women anyway, I think that that’s why women don’t come forward.’
Haven't You Heard Page 10